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The Reboot

When President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, approached John Podesta a few weeks ago about taking over the high-aggravation job of White House counselor, the biggest concern wasn’t that he would say no. After all, he had already done so twice before. Obama’s team was more worried that Podesta would say no and that word of his rejection would leak, making the White House look feckless and desperate at the end of Obama’s brutal fifth year in office. So, the circle of people in the know was kept to a small handful; it was so closely held that even the perpetually plugged-in “Davids”—Obama confidants Axelrod and Plouffe—weren’t consulted.

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That Obama’s team couldn’t afford to suffer even the minor embarrassment of a possible Podesta rebuff is a measure of just how precarious things have gotten less than a year after the president’s triumphant second inauguration—and how much the White House could use the services of Podesta, the closest thing Washington has to a turnaround specialist for wayward Democratic commanders in chief.

But despite the respectful coverage that greeted the news of Podesta’s appointment when the White House put it out last week, he will find that saving Obama is a mission easier undertaken than accomplished given the magnitude of the president’s problems—starkly illustrated by a Tuesday Washington Post-ABC News poll showing Obama’s approval rating at 43 percent, nine points below where he stood a year ago. Asking anyone, especially a man who hasn’t worked in the White House in more than a decade, to help rescue a presidency is a near-impossible task. But here was Obama’s team asking anyway, hoping Podesta will act as a catalyst to turn things around ahead of the 2014 midterms.

The next six months could be decisive: If the president can’t move past the Obamacare debacle to reset the agenda through executive action and targeted legislative campaigns on climate change, immigration and the minimum wage, he might never be able to regain his footing. The West Wing also hopes Podesta can help restore Obama’s slipping reputation as a president who can be trusted to run his own government competently. “You always come in with the perspective that the best way to do things is to be an outsider in Washington, but governing is something insiders do, and that’s what John does best,” says former White House press secretary Mike McCurry, who worked with Podesta when he was chief of staff in President Bill Clinton’s second term. “They needed him.”

This is not just about providing added muscle to a beleaguered and undermanned West Wing staff. According to interviews in recent weeks with an array of Obama insiders and a dozen current and former senior aides,Podesta’s hire is explicitly meant to shake things up inside the White House. In effect, I was told, it represents the clearest sign to date of the administration’s interest in shifting the paradigm of Obama’s presidency through the forceful, unapologetic and occasionally provocative application of White House power. Podesta, whose official mandate includes enforcement of numerous executive orders on emissions and the environment, suggestedas much when he spoke with me earlier this fall about Obama’s team. “They need to focus on executive action given that they are facing a second term against a cult worthy of Jonestown in charge of one of the houses of Congress,” he told me.

“I think [White House officials] were naturally preoccupied with legislating at first, and I think it took them a while to make the turn to execution. They are focused on that now,” Podesta added. “They have to realize that the president has broad authority, that he’s not just the prime minister. He can drive a whole range of action. They always grasped that on foreign policy and in the national security area. Now they are doing it on the domestic side.”

How Podesta chooses to execute is not a settled question, and how his formidable personality meshes with Obama’s no-drama palace guard—led by gatekeeper-in-chief McDonough—remains to be seen. Genial, wonky and self-effacing in calm times, Podesta is also known for having a short fuse; subordinates in the Clinton White House even had a name for angry Podesta—“Skippy”—a sulfuric evil twin so fearsome that even the brash Rahm Emanuel scrambled for cover. “It will be culture shock,” said one Democrat close to the White House. “But I guess Skippy will be the bad cop, and Denis will be the good cop.”

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Second terms have been presidential graveyards in recent decades, and the current one is hardly defying the trend. Richard Nixon was done in by Watergate less than two years into his second term, Ronald Reagan spent his final days suffering through the drip-drip of the Iran-contra scandal and George W. Bush saw his popularity collapse to the lowest level of any modern chief executive over the Iraq war. Bill Clinton, with Podesta in his employ, actually did pretty well by comparison: It’s hard to imagine saying that about a president who was impeached by the House of Representatives amid a sexual scandal involving an intern, but Clinton survived the humiliation of impeachment and got some credit for his single-minded pursuit of a limited, well-defined policy agenda. His reward: He’s the only ex-president in recent history to have retained value in the political marketplace after he left office.